The Elusive Truth About Tibet

Yesterday morning I was having my daily first cup of tea next door to my hotel at the Tenyang Coffee House, and I was practicing writing my Tibetan alphabet when a woman named Ann from Tasmania introduced herself. We chatted for a while and I mentioned some of my interests (including global issues, on behalf of the seniors) and she told me there was someone I had to meet. She walked me up a steep path around the corner to an apartment house whose balconies look south over the Kangra Valley and introduced me to JanWillem den Besten, a Dutch man who has lived in this area for more than ten years and who is deeply involved in Tibetan political issues. He was in a meeting, but he agreed to meet me later. As Ann and I walked back down the hill toward the coffee house, she mentioned that Jan was also a very reputable ornithologist who two years ago published the most authoritative guide book to date on the birds of the Kangra Valley and Dheodar Mountains. Since Mrs. Hays and I are birders, I could not wait to meet him!

In the mean time, I went to Rinchen Tsomo's, where I played with litle Ngawang, who is obsessed with my digital camera and insisted on taking several pictures. We also had some epic thumb-wrestling bouts. Then Tsomo gave me another Tibetan lesson. I can tell she is impatient with my slow progress, but I promised her I would try to work harder at it.

We had a small lunch consisting of tsampa and stir-fried greens from the market. Tsampa is something that people in Tibet eat every day, according to Tsomo, and she said that the Dalai Lama recommends it. Tsampa is made by taking a fistful of barley flour, a little black tea, and maybe a pinch of butter and sugar and then pressing it into little balls of dough. It is eaten with your fingers. I can see how very poor people could probably stay alive a long time by eating tsampa.

Over lunch, Tsomo told me that she would like to be able to travel back to Tibet to see her mother before she dies. Ngawang will be in boarding school here, which will give Tsomo the travel time, but she was worried she would not get a passport from the government. If she can get a passport, she will be able to take a four day bus journey to her village of Kamba in Dege, Tibet. She said that if she cannot get a passport she will cross the Himalayas on foot, like she did when she was fourteen. She dreads that possibility, and I have seen pictures of her frostbite wounds when she arrived barely alive in Nepal. I cannot believe she would even consider repeating such an experience, but Tsomo, like every other Tibetan I have met so far, would do anything for her family. She does not know it yet, but Mrs. Hays and I are going to give her the money for the passport, and cross our fingers that the goverment approves her application.

At 5pm I met with Jan at the Moon Peak Coffee House, the only other coffee house in Dharamsala, and the only place that serves actual coffee. We sat outside and watched the traffic on Buddha Temple Road as we talked. Jan is in charge of the local field office of an organization called Tibet Watch, which is assisted by the Free Tibet Campaign based in the UK, and whose mission it is to collect information about conditions in Tibet. Jan speaks Tibetan, and he was interrupted several times during our conversation by his cell phone. An urgent press release was being prepared by his office regarding a recent statement by the Dalai Lama and its effect on the people of Tibet.

The issue, which is the main topic of conversations in the Tibetan community here, surrounds the use of animal skins in traditional Tibetan ceremonies. Yesterday during his annual Kalachakra teachings in southern India, the Dalai Lama issued a plea to the Tibetan poeple to stop using the skins of otter, leopard, tiger and other endangered animals in their traditiional ceremonies and clothing. It seems that for centuries a very few Tibetan nobles would incorporate small patches from skins of these animals in their ceremonial clothing. In recent years, however, more people in Tibet have been able to afford these skins, and so the populations of these animals is shrinking terribly. The Dalai Lama issued his statement decrying the use of these skins, and the fascinating thing to observe is the thunderous effect of his voice among Tibetans both in India and at home. According to several sources, including Jan's many contacts, thousands of animal skins are being gathered to be burned to show that the practice has ended and that there must no longer be a trade in these skins in Tibet. In fact, there will be a demosntration here monday in the main square where anyone possessing such skins is invited to burn them to show their committment to the Dalai Lama's request to help save the remaining animals. Apparently, the Dalai Lama has the power to change fashion with one speech. Or at least that seems to be happening. We will see.

Of course the Chinese goverment is now between a rock and a hard place. If they go along with this change, they will be seen as complying with the request of an official traitor and enemy of the state, but if they continue to encourage using these endangered animals' skins, they will be contradicting their own conservation policies. This just shows, I think, the interconnectedness of every political issue (with economics, religion, tradition, freedom of expression, conservation of resources, etc.).

Jan said that the biggest issues for people in Tibet today are political freedom, education, and the right to participate in setting economic and social policy. While the number of political detainees has gone down since the early '90's from several thousand to several hundred, it is not because the Chinese are relaxing restictions. In fact, according to sources in Tibet, Jan said, the opposite is true. Society has become more Orwellian, and people are ratted out before they can even begin to express banned viewpoints. It is a very tightly controlled police state.

In some ways, however, we have been misled by exaggerations, Jan said. This surprised me, especially after I;d read so many web pages like this one about the environment in Tibet. Jan claims that the environment is not being destroyed as quickly and universally as is thought in the West, nor is education in the Tibetan language forbidden. Tibetan culture is surviving, he says....to a point. Apparently a Tibetan child can learn Tibetan in school through middle school, but once high school begins, a choice must be made. If you want to continue your education, you must do so in Chinese, and since Tibetan children typically do not start Chinese until later than the Han Chinese population, who grow up speaking it, they cannot compete in the rigorous Chinese exam system that leads to college admission.

Most Tibetans, therefore, leave school instead of continuing. Most go back to work on the family farm, herd yaks or sheep, or work in low-skill industry. This gives the Chinese what they want, a Tibetan underclass. Some, like the friends I have made here, escape to Bhutan, Nepal or India in hopes of learning English, exercising more political freedom and obtaining greater prosperity. Even if they do learn English, however, there are not many job opportunities for them, and in fact they begin to lose their Tibetan language and culture under all the Western influence of media and pop culture, which is omnipresent here in Dharamsala. In fact, Jan admits he prefers to hire tranlators directly from Tibet vs. refugees here, whose Tibetan is weak since they stopped studying in grade school and are no longer immersed in their own culture but live instead on a hybrid Indo-Tibetan-Western island here on this mountain.

I asked Jan if there was anything someone living in St. Louis, Missouri could do to support the Tibetan people in their struggle, and he said that for now the best thing to do would be to visit Free Tibet and then to keep an eye out in coming months for his own organization's website, which will be called Tibet Watch.

After my interview with Jan, we talked about birds for a little bit and then he was off to another interview, still answering his cell phone every fifteen minutes to coordinate a press release to the Reuters news agency. I took a walk to sort through all the information we discussed.

As I walked through the twilight down a narrow street that leads to Bhagsu Road, I bumped into one of Tsomo's friends, a thangka painter and a monk named Kalsang Dorje. He had an armload of potatos from the market and insisted that I follow him home and eat supper with him. I consented and he led me down a steep footpath into the very ramshackle jungle of hillside hovels on the backside of Dharmasala, a shantytown of very poor Gaddi tribespeople, Tibetan refugees, Kashmiri traders and Paharis from the valley below. We wound our way along the trash-strewn path, stepping over rivulets of raw sewage, passing dimly lit huts, concrete block houses and sheet metal sheds, most with only one bare light bulb, barefoot children, dirty mattresses on the floor and single gas burners for cooking visible through a thin curtain that covered their open doorways. We walked for twenty minutes and then arrived at Dorje's own little concrete shelter, a single room that was part of a row of single rooms with concrete floors, like a storage locker. In fact, his place was the size of a small storage locker, and he had two roomates in order to be able to afford to live there.

Dorje squatted in the space between two sleeping pallets and set to work chopping potatos, scallions, tomatoes, eggplant, garlic cloves and spinach on an overturned wooden box. He boiled rice on his single gas burner, opening his door to the night to keep us from succumbing to the fumes. Soon his roomates arrived, Jinpa Gyatso and Karma Wangchuk. Gyatso spoke very good English so he and I did most of the talking, but he would translate for Dorje and Wangchuk as well. We had a long evening of fascinating conversation which I will not ty to repeat here, but I was struck by how much Gyatso's story echoed everything Jan ahd told me. Back home, the police watched his every move, bribing family members to rat out fellow family members, listening through walls and accusing Tibetans of every imaginable crime. He came over the Himalayas on foot, walking for a month and at one point going without food for three days until he stumbled across some European mountaineers who shared some bicuits with him. He came here to study English and other subjects forbidden to him by the Chinese government in Tibet. He came to listen to the Dalai Lama and maybe to shake his hand. He wants to be a translator, and he wants to help teach others about Tibetan culture and religion.

As the hour turned late, I learned that Dorje would return to the Tsering monastery farther down the valley the next day. He had chosen to invite me over for his last supper among his friends before he left secular life for a long while to continue his thangka studies. I thaked him profusely for his hospitality and for the delicious meal (it really was!) of stir fried eggplant and hot chilis, fried potato and scallion, and egg drop soup with tomatoes and spinach. He and Gyatso walked with me up the treacheous unlit path back to Bhagsu Road, at some points grabbing my hand to make sure I did not fall. They wanted to walk me all the way back to my hotel, another quarter mile, but I told them I was okay and I thanked them and walked "home" on the dark deserted streets, with only the barking of dogs and the squeak of my rucksack buckle to break the silence.

It is hard not to feel something very powerful when peope who have almost nothing offer to share all that they have with you. I will never forget Dorje and Gyatso and Wangchuk and their hospitality.

What do I know about sharing? What do I know about generosity?